Sandro Aguilar

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

A journey through the real history and the tales of a region in southern Portugal and a portrait of the people who have lived there, weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs.

In a distant past, Léon and Elvira Berthelini, itinerant artists, make their living hopping from town to town. In Covarronca, harassed by the Police Commissioner, they are forced to spend the night out in the open. That’s when they meet Stubbs, a young Cambridge student, with whom they find shelter in the home of a painter at odds with his wife. In return for the hospitality, they remind their hosts that the love of art resolves the art of love. Meanwhile, an unusual curse sends them on absurd journeys into the 21st century, where the future of social security and of a rock band are at stake.

The series develops around cases of homicides that occurred during the summer, at the time of the economic and social crisis that affected Portugal.

Obsessed with questions about his past, a bankrupt, white Brazilian filmmaker undertakes an epic journey from Brazil to Mozambique and Portugal. This melancholic fable mixes animation, live-action, voice-overs, genres, and continents to explore Brazil's colonial past.

When a terminally ill French actress decides to spend her last vacation with her large family in Sintra, her relatives grapple with their own insecurities.

Gaspard, a teenager from the suburbs of Lisbon, falls into the hands of the Ogre, a man who has made a pact with the Devil. The Ogre uses the boy to attract tourists, whom he transforms into animals and then kills. Gaspard escapes with a donkey and a dog that he has grown fond of, and in an enchanted manor, he meets the spirit of Queen D. Maria I.

In 1971, António Lobo Antunes' life is brutally interrupted when he is drafted into the Portuguese Army to serve as a doctor in one of the worst zones of the Colonial War – the East of Angola. Away from everything dear he writes letters to his wife while he is immersed in an increasingly violent setting. While he moves between several military posts he falls in love for Africa and matures politically. At his side, an entire generation struggles and despairs for the return home. In the uncertainty of war events, only the letters can make him survive.

Suellen is a toll booth attendant who starts using her job to help a gang of thieves steal watches from people driving to the coast. But only for a noble cause: to send her son to an expensive gay conversion workshop.

Tiago, a tour guide with a broken heart leads Karen, a grieving and aging Brazilian woman, around a Lisbon of strange suicidal heroes. Tiago lives with his father, Raul, an old sailor haunted by historical defeats, and with his son, Manuel, a teenager fantasising of a solitary, but erotic, trip to the cosmos. All together, they take Karen through dreams, lost glories, and catastrophes to meet a fallen hero who disappeared many centuries ago on an island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Lisbon, 1980s, Rosa, a woman joins a group of young people disappointed at the post-Revolutionary Portugal. Part of a far-left clandestine armed organization, they share political views and a daily life that makes them grow closer. But their idealism collides head-on with a changing country and a large-scale police operation targeting them. Fleeing on a road with no return and no way forward, their existence is made up of bank robberies, bombs, friendships, prison, love and death. Trapped, their only choice is to keep on the run until they get arrested or killed.

Patrick, 20-years-old, lives in Paris with his older boyfriend. He runs a teenage pornography website, which results in a prison sentence following a raid at a party. Mário, 8-years-old, was kidnapped 12 years ago in Portugal. Patrick and Mário are the same person with two conflicting identities: a life in Paris filled with parties, drugs, and promiscuity and a new rural life in Portugal, where he feels obliged to reconnect with a broken family.

Crista, Carloto and João are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden. The three of them share household routines, day after day… And they are not the only ones.

The story of Brazil’s first emperor, returning to Europe on board the English ship Warspite. The trip makes Pedro conquer his fears and face his life from a personal point of view. He goes back in time and relives outstanding moments of his earlier life – since his childhood, when in 1808 he arrived coming from Portugal with his family, until he left in the dead of the night, in 1831, running away from Brazil.

Fragments of spaces, buildings and structures, memories and remains of past eras, places of work or leisure now inhabited by our memories alone, or really forgotten. Dead things or living proof of time, natural elements, and human predators themselves.

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells King Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. As in the book, these stories are tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events.

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

Despite his age and general weariness, Gebo keeps on working as an accountant to provide for his family. He lives with his wife, Doroteia, and his daughter-in-law, Sofia, but it is the absence of João, son and husband, that worries them.Gebo seems to be hiding something, especially to Doroteia, who is anxiously waiting to see her son again. Sofia is also waiting for her husband to come home, and yet she fears him. All of a sudden, João arrives and everything changes.